Bill Countryman Good Shepherd Berkeley

SECOND SUNDAY OF EASTER, April 28, 2019

Year C: Acts 5:27-32; Psalm 118:14-29; Revelation 1:4-8; John 20:19-31

Every year on the Second Sunday of Easter, we hear the same Gospel reading, which we commonly refer to as the story of “Doubting Thomas.” It’s a bit like a cup of strong black coffee after the bubbly effervescent quaff of Easter. Brings us right back down to earth, even as we continue singing “Alleluia.”

Actually, it’s a misnomer to call this the story of Doubting Thomas. It’s really the story of Doubting Everybody. And the story began with the Gospel reading we heard last week, where Mary Magdalene goes to the tomb and finds it open and empty. Jesus had spoken about his coming crucifixion and resurrection, but no one seems to have caught his meaning. Mary can’t imagine that he’s anything but dead. She tells Peter and John, and they doubt her story. Still, they go off to check, probably muttering to themselves, “Oh, she’s got the wrong tomb. Who could possibly have moved that stone?” But they find it as she said. In fact, they identify the linen wrappings left on the floor as the ones Jesus had been buried in. What can they do but trudge back in a state of perplexity and doubt.

Mary lingers at the tomb weeping, but she stoops down to look into the tomb and sees twoangelssitting in it, one where the head of Jesus’ body had lain, the other at the foot. This is very strange. Death, according to the Torah, renders everything around it impure. Yet, here are two angels, utterly pure beings, sitting right where Jesus’ body had been. They ask her why she’s weeping, and she tells them. But her grief is so great she can’t bear to wait for a response. Instead, she turns away, only to run into someone she takes to be the gardener. 

We can easily understand it. She’s at a complete loss. She’s not only lost her beloved teacher; now she can’t even visit his burial place since the body has been moved. It’s not even too surprising that she doesn’t recognize him. After all, this can’t possibly be Jesus standing in front of her. But then, when he calls her by name, her entire world changes around her. All her existing presuppositions have been shattered. And she has set foot in a new age. All her doubts are caught up into an unimaginable sense of joy.

Mary told the disciples, who apparently doubted this part of her story, too. Yet, that very evening, a frightened little group behind barred doors for fear that the mob violence of Friday hadn’t quite exhausted itself, they, too, see Jesus standing before them. And they’re as disoriented as she had been. It was impossible, of course, but there he was—a being now of a different order, but still the same Jesus who had been crucified. He made a point of showing them his wounds so that they would know that. 

And, then, when the disciples told Thomas, who’d been missing from that gathering, he was as doubtful as they’d been, as doubtful as Mary had been before Jesus spoke her name. This is just the third round of doubt in these stories. But it’s also the climactic one, because here—on this very Sunday going on two thousand years ago—Thomas first gives voice to the true shock of the resurrection. 

People sometimes suppose that the story of Jesus’ resurrection was easier to believe in the first century than in our own time. They might say, “Well, people believed in miracles then. Even Elijah and Elisha were said to have brought children back to life. Jesus himself had done it. Ancient people were just more credulous than we. So what would kind of problem would this one be? It’s just more fabulous than the others?” 

No, actually, our own world is full of credulous people, too. It’s just that we exercise our credulity on the internet and conspiracy theories and such like. It’s clear in these stories that this array of first-century people were no more prepared to believe the resurrection than we would be. Jesus’ disciples were completely unprepared for what was happening to them even if he had mentioned it in his teaching. This was something that went far beyond the mere working of miracles. This was the beginning of a new world.

Thomas’s response to Jesus, as we heard, was “My Lord and my God.” It sounds at first, in English, as if Thomas is addressing Jesus with those titles. In Greek, it’s clear, actually, that he’s not. He may be saying “[You are] my Lord and my God.” Or it may be an exclamation, “My Lord! My God!.” Either way, it was an acknowledgement that God was truly at work, right there, right in front of Thomas, fashioning a new creation. Thomas realized that he was standing on the threshold of a world very different from the one he’d been living in. 

The disciples were living, of course, as we all inevitably do, in their past, in a world of limited possibilities most of which they’d already explored. Our past experience pretty much defines what we expect of the future. Yes, they’d seen miracles of healing, even performed some themselves. For most people in their day, it was just the only available form of healing. But the Risen Jesus wasn’t some minor aberration in an otherwise familiar world. He belonged to a different world altogether with different rules and different expectations. He showed up in locked rooms. He still bore the marks of the wounds that killed him, but was more alive than ever. His new world crossed paths with theirs, but wasn’t limited by their normal expectations. Above all, he embodied a world where love and hope are the driving forces, not fear and death. 

The world we’ve all been living in is a world where love and hope sometimes have a very difficult struggle just to survive. Fear and death keep reasserting themselves. In recent years, their power seems to have redoubled. It’s a big leap to get from a world shadowed by death and fear to a world lighted by love and hope. None of the disciples found it easy. Thomas was no different from the rest. But he understood better than anyone else what was going on. From here on, nothing would be quite the same. 

And what would it mean for us, doubters as we all are—even the most faithful of us—what would it mean for us to recognize that the world has changed around us? For some people it comes as a moment of illumination when we discover that the deep reality of life is different from the day to day rules we’ve been living by. The poet W. S. Auden told of a moment of being overwhelmed by an inexplicable awareness of God’s love for this world and its people. 

Others discover the power of this new world in acts of service, given and recieved. I’ve heard people say something like that when they talk about participating in the Friday lunches here. It may come to some of us in reading or study, in singing and worship, in the words of scripture or of a hymn. Maybe we see it at work in another person’s life and think, “There’s something important going on there!”

In Thomas’s case, it was Jesus standing in front of him with his wounds bared. And Jesus’ response to Thomas’s realization was something like this: “You’ve seen and understood and put your trust in this new age. Good. But the really lucky ones (Yes, that’s pretty much what “blessed” means here)—the really lucky ones are those who somehow just know.” And maybe some of us fit that pattern, too: the pattern of those blessed from an early age with awareness that the world of hope and love is the real world and the hostility and hate of this world will not, ultimately, prevail. But even for those lucky ones, there is still a lifelong opportunity to be surprised anew and move deeper into the gifts of the new world.

However you may discover this world, judge all the doubters in this morning’s stories kindly. Like all of us, they found it hard to escape the prison of their past, of the world they lived in, of their sometimes difficult experiences, of their long-standing assumptions.—hard to imagine a life of trust and hope and love, hard to take the long step of actually living as citizens of that new world. In fact, they probably sensed that it would probably get them in trouble here and now. But the new world was and remains an available choice. And it’s a choice that offers us new freedom and life.